By the way I forgot to tell you she says she remembers you peeing in her backyard when you were five years old.”
I laugh, not willing to leave just yet.
“It must have been too regular an event for me to remember,” I say, marveling at Angela’s ability to kindle desire in me. Yet it shouldn’t surprise me, for it was always like this between us. I try to read her
expression, but I can’t.
“Would you like to go out sometime?” I ask, hoping I don’t sound too plaintive.
“You need to go,” she says firmly, coming over to me and taking me by the arm.
On her front porch with her yearbook under my arm I notice paint peeling above the door.
The house could almost be considered shabby. I wonder if she’ll have to take out another mortgage if she intends to stay in it. I hug my suit coat to me against a brisk cold wind that has arisen since I’ve been inside.
“So what happens now?” I ask, not willing to pretend there was no chemistry between us.
Angela points with her chin past me.
“I’ll be answering a lot of questions about you.”
I turn and look across the street to see movement behind a curtain.
“This place is creepy,” I say.
“I can’t believe you stayed.” I wonder how many people know I was here for a couple of hours Thanksgiving weekend. Sarah and I didn’t see anyone other than a black octogenarian female who lived in public
housing for the elderly. Angela hasn’t mentioned it, and with other things on my mind, I haven’t either. If I asked her, I’m sure she wouldn’t divulge the reason I was here.
“I need to figure out what just happened,” she says dryly, “before I can begin to worry about the last thirty years.”
“I know you do,” I say, wondering if she feels anything for me at all.
Angela could continue mourning for Dwight for months or even longer.
Given my history, I couldn’t complain if she did.
“Obviously, I’d like to see you again,” I say awkwardly, trying to forget how hurt Amy would be to hear these words coming from my mouth.
“But as friends, okay?” she says, warily, hugging herself in the cold.
I nod.
“Then what about meeting an old friend for breakfast Saturday morning?”
I ask, deciding to spend the night in Bear Creek tomorrow night instead of driving back home after the arraignment. We couldn’t get more innocent than that.
Angela considers for a moment, visibly hesitates, but finally says, “Okay. I’ll meet you at eight at the Cotton Boll. It’s out on Highway 1 towards Helena.”
“Where’s a decent place to stay?” I ask. Her boys’ rooms are vacant, but I doubt I’ll get an invitation.
“The Bear Creek Inn on 79 toward Clarendon isn’t supposed to be terrible,” Angela says, not even pausing to consider inviting me.
As the afternoon gloom of the Delta fades into blackness and I begin to put miles between us, I wonder what I am doing. Can we really just pick up where we left off thirty years ago? Should we even try?
Getting it wonderfully wrong, Rosa, exasperated by my stubbornness, used to scream, let sleeping dogs die. Maybe I should take her hint and try to keep the past buried. In the swampy soil of the Delta, however, six feet isn’t always enough. Though it seems as if I have a good handle on my hometown, I have a momentary feeling there may be ghosts I don’t want to see.
Tired by the drive home, I glance at my watch.
Nine o’clock. If my greyhound and I are going, we need to get out of here.
“I think we’ll just go on and sleep at the house tonight.”
From the opposite end of her couch, my girlfriend exclaims, “You don’t have any heat yet!”
“It’s not too bad,” I say. Actually, it is supposed to get down to thirty tonight. How could I buy a house whose heating system goes out the week after I signed the papers? It passed inspection, and the sale
closed a week ago, but three days ago when I flipped the switch, it never even turned on, and the pilot light was blazing like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
“It’s supposed to be fixed tomorrow.”
“It’ll be too cold for Jessie,” Amy protests.
“She doesn’t have a coat for this weather.”
I stare at my dog’s powerful haunches. More like a lightweight brindle-colored jacket. I sigh.
Guests wear their welcome out sooner than dead fish any day in my experience. The hitch is that Amy has longterm plans for us and seems willing to endure any indignity we can heap on her.
Jessie has just taken a dump on her carpet.
Maybe another night will cure that kind of talk.
“This is what it would be like for us,” I say, throwing in her face our fifteen years age difference.
“Except in a few years it would be me instead of Jessie you’d be cleaning up for.”
Amy wipes Jessie’s nose, which is about to drip, on the sleeve of her warm-up as if she were the harried mother of a two-year-old.
“I’d get you some diapers,” she says, not cracking a smile.
“And then I’d stick your butt in boiling water a couple of times.
That’d help you remember.”
I laugh, knowing Amy is okay about the carpet if she can joke with me.
“See, Jessie,” I say, leaning over to inspect a small raw spot on her leg, “there are ways to get your attention.” “Not hers,” Amy says pointedly.
“Yours.”
I glance around her apartment and am reminded how little we have in common. Besides the age difference, Amy and I have radically different tastes. When she decorated my office she toned down the art she selected, but on display in her apartment, a two-bedroom in a gray brick structure just off the Wilbur Mills freeway, are drawings, paintings, and photographs, rarely, if ever, seen in a state where most of the inhabitants (myself included) are more at ease with art done by the numbers in Norman Rockwell style. Here, Amy has just redone her apartment by hanging life-size nudes on all the walls. A couple of men, too-one, a guy with a penis the size of a boa constrictor that has just finished a good lunch.
This new phase is weird and embarrassing. I look up at a photograph of a Marilyn Monroe lookalike on the opposite wall. She has a safety pin running through her left nipple.
“What does it make you feel?” she asked me when I saw this particular photo for the first time. Nausea, I whispered, fascinated even as my scrotum tried to retract inside my body. I’m all for having my consciousness raised, but does it have to be a twenty-four-hour-a-day job?
“What does your mother think about this stuff?” I ask tonight. I can’t imagine having friends over for dinner and having them try to pretend they aren’t dying to get home so they can get on the phone and gossip about the horror show on Amy and Gideon’s walls.
“She lasted about twenty minutes and then turned around and left,” Amy admits. Dressed in a green and blue warm-up suit that fits her like a glove, and with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, Amy looks like a teenager instead of a serious collector of sadomasochistic art.
“My new stepfather thinks I’ve lost my mind. God knows what Daddy would have thought.”
Poor Mr. Gilchrist. A retired factory worker from a paper mill in Pine Bluff who died only a year ago, he must be spinning in the hottest rung of hell for having allowed his only child to desert the South and accept a scholarship at a fancy school on the East Coast. First, his daughter wasted his hard-earned money on an art history degree at Princeton, and now she has the nerve to stain his memory by exhibiting the results on her walls.
“Who was that guy, Mapplethorpe?
Didn’t he do some statue of a man pissing into another guy’s mouth or
something just totally beyond the pale? When is his exhibit getting up here?”
Amy rolls her eyes. I may not be educable.
“I don’t think he’s in my budget for next month.” She reaches over and pats my leg.